Elite Devs, plz help!?🙂
Hey Everyone,
I am a 3YoE backend developer with little AI role and web development experience in the industry and I wanted to grow my career as more like an ✨Elite Engineer✨ who not just builds stuff but optimizes it to the core, oversees the future bottlenecks, the alternative approaches blah blah and you get the point. But the problem is that my learning is all over places. Please suggest/ guide you to be that ✨Elite Engineer✨ if you can. I want to continue to be a backend engineer (no more switching domain)
Disclaimer: I don’t want to do it because of the money (of course I need a future) but to have a solid understanding of it (it would be great if I end up as SDE)
I think i qualify to answer.
The last statement is your problem. “Solid understanding” mindset is holding you back.
To be elite don’t care about learning, only care about making more money.
No company will give your higher salary coz you understand how to manually handle tcp sockets in kotlin, but if you are money minded it will show when you open your mouth. Money attracts money.
Sorry to burst your bubble, since we all have been taught from childhood to not run behind money and rather run behind learning. Very fee realised this earlier in their career. Many people don’t realise this at all and the “solid understanding” mindset is passed on to the offsprings. Like poor breeds poor.
LOL
I 100% agree with you after seeing the capitalism but let me rephrase I wanted out this, actually I want to the guy who knows ins out outs of his work and master it across the time. It’s for my the soul and I really don’t care being best employee or just focus on money. I am huge believer of switch after 2yrs over appraisal but there’s kind of void feeing which makes me uncomfortable of knowing that I am growing superficially only.
If you haven’t read, you can give it a try reading the book, designing data intensive applications
The things you are seeking to learn can only be learned by building stuff in a production environment.
Its a very common and unsolved problem in SD, internet is filled with begginer stuff, but very little about taking the next step.
I highly suggest working for seed startups, in my experience they provide the most learning experience if your startup scales. My first job was in a startup which was just an excel sheet and from that we moved to handling 3000rps, from a single ec2 box to kube cluster orchastering over 30 services and thats not even alot when it comes to scale. I had the opportunity to see the stack grow and work handson solving scale as we faced.
Its very tough to replicate above by yourself in doing open source or something as the above also include non technical stuff like, team building, hiring as you scale, cost optimisation, business calls etc.
TLDR: join a seed stage starup and hope that startup scales, stick to it for some years.
Thank you for the advice,
I even did the same thing and joined at an early stage and even got promoted as Tech Lead too, where I handled a team of 14, attended client call and built end-to-end solutions, but the company didn’t scale due to the saturation. The company prioritized “Customer Satisfaction” over “State of the Art”, where every project became lift and shift types sadly, and I left the company since, even pay was super low.
Now thinking of self-teaching myself the remaining bit of engineering.
+1